Endymion Spring

Mainz, Spring, 1453

I awoke from an uneasy slumber.

Peter lay on his back beside me, his hands cupped thoughtfully across his chest. Sculpted by the moonlight, he resembled one of the figures entombed in the cathedral on the opposite side of the city, a model of calm and repose. Yet, despite his outward composure, his mind was a hive of activity, busily concocting a plan to get me — and the dragon skin — as far away from Mainz as possible.

We could hear Fust prowling like an animal downstairs, riffling through the contents of the chest, which I had opened a short time earlier. I wondered if he'd found the dormant words written in my blood.

"You don't realize what you've done," grumbled Peter at last, filling the room with a menacing rumble of words like thunder.

I pretended to sleep, but he thumped me in the small of the back. I turned over and was surprised to find that his eyes were moist with tears. He was genuinely afraid, but whether for my well-being or his own, I could not tell.

"There'll be no stopping him. You — the paper, whatever you've done to it — you've ruined everything. You're not safe."

I looked at him, frightened.

"Fust knows," he said. "He cant see the words properly yet, but they're there; he's sure of it. He says you've done something to prevent the skin from unleashing its potential. But he'll figure it out soon, believe you me. And then you'll be in danger. We all will."

He was silent for a moment, as if considering the awful truth he had to say. "It's not only the knowledge he's after, but the power. He wants to be like God and will side with the Devil until he gets there. Nothing will stand in his way. Not even me."

I could hear the hurt and disillusionment in his voice and realized that he, too, had been duped. Fust had used him. He had feigned his sudden fit of fever to get Peter out of the room, so that I would creep out of my hiding place and unlock the chest. He had known that I was there all along and had carefully shown me what to do. It had been a test and I had walked right into it — like a fool!

"You'll have to leave," said Peter then, using the words I least wanted to hear. I cringed at the thought. I didn't want to be orphaned yet again.

Peter could read the helpless appeal in my eyes. "You have no idea what Fust will do," he tried to convince me. "He'll use other children — not just you — to release the words in the paper…if that's what it takes. Anything to achieve power. You must go and take the whole damned skin with you! It's the only solution."

I was trembling now — and not just from cold.

Unable to lie still, I got up and crept over to the dormitory window, which was set high in the wall. I stood on a stool and gazed out over the peaceful, sleeping city. Even though spring had arrived, a trace of winter still silvered the tops of the surrounding houses at night. Roofs sloped towards the cathedral like frosty waves rearing against a cliff. Mainz, I realized, had always been my home. I had no desire to leave it.

"The dragon skin can be neither burned nor destroyed," said Peter, musing aloud. "He's shown us that much already. So we need to hide it somewhere Fust will never go, somewhere he can't follow. But where?"

I glanced back at Peter, who was staring up at the joists of the ceiling. He noticed me watching him, shivering in my nightshirt, and in sympathy lifted the covers to allow me close. I tiptoed back to the bed and huddled next to his warm, protective body. He had become a brother to me.

"I'll help Herr Gutenberg with the Bible," he promised, pulling the blanket up around my shoulders and rolling on his side, "but you must leave, the sooner the better. We'll figure out where. Perhaps after Frankfurt…Until then, I'll protect you."

He yawned. Despite my predicament, he could not keep his eyes open and was soon asleep, leaving me even more worried and desolate than before. I listened to the sound of his breathing, which rose and fell in steady waves. Even now, he was drifting into another world, a land of dreams, where I could not follow.

Peter had Christina. Herr Gutenberg had the press. Where, I wondered, did this leave me?

To comfort myself, I reached out to make sure that the toolkit was safe beneath the straw mattress, where I had concealed it a short while ago. A judder passed through me as my fingers once again brushed against the snow-soft sheets of dragon-skin. I was soothed by a momentary feeling of calm.

What I didn't realize was that the skin was already preparing itself for the long journey ahead. The paper was slowly stitching itself into the leather cover of my toolkit and another set of dragon's claws was magically coiling round the front edges of the bundle like a lock, guarding its precious secret.

I had opened a book that could not be closed, started a story that had no obvious conclusion. It was a tale in which I wanted to play no part. Yet Peter was right: I had to go.

The only question was…where?

The answer came a few days later.

Frankfurt was teeming with people. Heavy boats lay at anchor in the choppy river, bringing merchants from far abroad, while traders and journeymen thronged the muddy roads leading to the city walls and blocked the gates with their wagons and carts. Weighed down with bundles of wood and straw, peasants and artisans trudged across the bridge from the surrounding countryside to set up stalls in the cobbled squares. Oblivious to it all, clergymen and patricians waded through the streets like dainty birds among the common sparrows, showing off their finery.

Peter gazed at them longingly. "One day, I shall be able to afford a cloak like that," he whispered as a wealthy nobleman strolled past in a bright green robe trimmed with rabbit fur.

Everywhere, people flocked towards the Town Hall — a string of tall gabled buildings in the old quarter, close to the market. Banners and pennants flapped from the walls and bells clanged in the spires in a joyous celebration, summoning pilgrims to church before letting them loose on the fair.

Downstairs, in the large stone hall, goldsmiths, silversmiths and craftsmen of every description were preparing their booths. Among the displays of Bohemian glass, Italian oils and Flemish cloth were brooches, rings and salt cellars wrought from the finest metals. The selection was astounding. I had never seen such riches.

Peter loitered by the drapers' stalls, looking like a smitten lover as he trailed his fingers along the bales of linen, brocade and silk. A purse of crushed crimson velvet eventually took his fancy — a present for Christina — and he stroked it like an exotic animal before finally parting with the coins to buy it. It cost nearly everything he had.

"That must prove I love her," he remarked as I strolled past.

I preferred the aromas wafting from the far reaches of the hall and wandered over to the savory corner where bronze-skinned merchants had set up a foreign coastline of fruits and fragrances. Horns, sacks and pouches full of ginger, saffron, aniseed and almonds lay next to the stickiest dates from northern Africa, which clung to the roof of my mouth as I chewed them.

I had just stuffed a flame-colored powder that ignited a fire in each nostril when Peter tapped me on the shoulder and waved several coins before my eyes.

"Herr Gutenberg says we are to enjoy ourselves," he said with a grin. "I know how we can spend it." His eyebrows performed a mischievous jig on his brow and he steered me towards the door.

I glanced back at my Master's stall, which he had erected near a man in a preposterous cockerel-colored outfit, who was selling rolls of leather for binding books. Beside him, a heavyset man with a warty nose flogged gory prints of martyred saints to pilgrims, who devoured such things in their devotion.

The Bible had been attracting a large amount of interest since the opening of the fair. Fust, in fact, was having to fend off merchants, all clamoring like pigs at a trough to see the quality of the print.

"Why, this is neater than a scribe's hand," I heard one say. "I don not need my lenses!" He waved a pair of pointy bone spectacles in the air as though my Master had performed a minor miracle.

"How do you obtain such results?" asked another, laying his hands on a sample of paper and holding it up to the light streaming in from the narrow windows.

Fust swatted away his fingers. "You may admire, but not touch," he hissed. His eyes caught mine from across the room and I flinched. All the way from Mainz, he had been breathing down my neck, trying to determine why he could not yet read from the magical paper in his chest. I was afraid that he would soon discover the pages in my toolkit, which I now carried on my person at all times, and throttle me.

"But the words are written back to front," objected a third, dour-looking man with ashen lips. He was examining a tray of type I had set up specifically for the exhibit. "What manner of devilry is this? The Word of God must not be interfered with in this way!"

I did not get to hear more. Peter grabbed me by the elbow and tugged me up the stairs.

I had to shield my eyes against the pandemonium outside. Acrobats tumbled and rolled in the square, dentists and quacks extracted teeth and coins from the vulnerable and weak, and vendors called attention to wild and wonderful beasts brought in just for the occasion: flightless birds with ungainly necks and massive pack animals with enormous ears and hides like wrinkled men. The air was full of smells and noise, chaos and confusion.

Away from the hall, Peter reverted to a little boy. He bobbed in and out of the crowds, swiping small rounded loaves from the street-sellers and juggling them in his hands before biting into them hungrily and running away from their catcalls of abuse.

For a while, we amused ourselves by leaping over barrels and coils of rope in the coopers' district — just one of five tiny lanes abutting the main square like the fingers of a hand — and ended up, breathless with exhaustion, outside a house the color of dried ox blood. It stood on several wooden plinths like a fussy woman trying not to get her skirts dirty.

Nearby was the Plague House, a darkened building marked by iron crosses above the shuttered windows. We dared each other to stand outside its ominous façade for a count of ten while hopping on one foot to ward off the evil eye of the gorgon carved into the wooden pediment above the door. A bailiff, however, chased us off, telling us to be more respectful of the dead.

Stonemasons were busy extending the tower of the cathedral in the distance, and we moved closer to investigate. The city reverberated with the sounds of chisels and hammers, tap-tap-tapping in the air. The sky snowed chipped stone. Tall ladders, lashed together with ropes, zigzagged up the side of the building and an intricate system of pulleys and wheels spun in mid-air, hoisting baskets of stone bricks up to the masons, who stood on thin walkways high above the earth to receive them. Laborers loaded with mortar scurried up and down the ladders like ants.

Just looking at them made me dizzy. One foot wrong and the whole structure would come tumbling down faster than the Tower of Babel. I much preferred the safety of the press…

The thought reminded me of he dragon skin and the need to get as far away from Fust as possible, and I felt the city crumble around me. It was no good standing still, enjoying myself.

Peter grabbed me by the elbow. Lured back by the smell of food, we returned to the market. Spoiled for choice, we each selected a steaming frankfurter from the sausage stands and spent a long time licking the fatty juice from our wrists. A discordant blast from a trumpeter atop St. Nikolai's Church alerted us to an important arrival by river, and so, still chomping on our sausages, we headed the short distance to the quay, just in time to see a three-masted boat from the Low Countries glide like a wicker swan towards the custom tower.

A rotund man disembarked, followed by a retinue of servants, all carrying chests full of cloth. He cut a grand, distinguished figure.

Peter sucked in his breath and looked forlornly at the small velvet purse he had purchased for Christina. "It's not very much, is it?" he said. It was all I could do to prevent him from tossing it in the waves.

A hoary old gentleman stood on the quayside to greet the newcomer. He bowed so low I feared he would kiss the ground beneath the stranger's feet. Together, they marched across the road to one of the finest residences in Frankfurt: the Saalhof, where the most important dignitaries were housed — unlike the communal inn where Peter and I would spend the night.

Tiring of the spectacle, we worked our way back towards the old quarter, losing ourselves in a maze of tight, twisting lanes. By now we were thirsty and the gleam of the remaining coins in Peter's hand had rekindled a spark in his eye.

"Follow me," he said as he spotted a nearby alehouse.

The Little Lamb was not as innocuous as its name suggested.

A dark hovel, it shrank into the corner of an overgrown courtyard, surrounded by tottering houses that blocked out the sun. A well in the middle of the yard had long ago dried and was now choked with filth.

Like a mongrel with its tail between its legs, Peter sidled up to the tavern and pushed his way inside.

The room was thick with smoke. People played at dice and draughts over large, upended barrels, and the floor was slick with straw. I did not care to look down, but followed Peter as he threaded his way through the crowd and ordered two flagons of apple-wine from the innkeeper, a boarlike man with tusks for teeth.

Clutching our sour-smelling drinks, we dived into a back room, away from the noise and commotion out front.

The room was empty, apart from a slovenly individual lying in a pool of vomit in the corner. Peter paid him scant attention, but walked over to a bench and started speaking on his favorite subject: Christina. His voice swooned whenever he mentioned her and I stared moodily into my drink, letting the smell of rotting apples fester in my nostrils. I did not like to admit that I was jealous.

"Ah, young love," murmured the man in the corner, looking up at us with two unfocused eyes. "You can never trust the heart of another."

Peter paused in his description of Christina's beauty and frowned.

"Amor vincit omnia," the stranger continued in a voice that hinted of too much drink. "It's a load of tripe, if you ask me." His words had a foreign lilt to them and I could not understand them clearly.

Peter, however, detected something in the accent and studied the man more intently. Huge continents of dirt had drifted down his clothes and his face was streaked with grime. It looked as though he had spent a lot of time sleeping in fields…or else on taproom floors.

"Love speaks with a false tongue," the drunkard lamented aloud, continuing his bitter soliloquy. "It kisses you in one ear, then turns with a hiss to bite the other…"

"Enough!" Peter slapped his iron flagon on the table before us. "What do you know of love, friend?" His voice was venomous.

"Plenty," replied the man, with a simpering smile that revealed several missing teeth. "My heart has been broken more times than years you've been alive…boy."

Peter did not rise to the insult, but leaned closer to whisper something in my ear. Then I noticed what he had. In his hands, the man clutched a small brown leather book. A thin ribbon, like a lock of hair or rat's tail, slipped out from between its pages, marking his place.

This was a rare sight. Not many people could read books, let alone afford to buy them. Either this man was a thief or an impoverished scholar, down on his luck. They were often the poorest sort.

He glanced up at us, feeling the weight of our eyes on him.

"It's the tale of the two lovers," he said, indicating the volume in his fingers. "Piccolomini's latest. Scurrilous, rude and guaranteed to put the color back in your young friend's cheek."

He nodded in my direction and I blushed, despite myself. The man took no notice. A sour belch, like a toad, escaped his throat.

"May I?" Peter took the book from the man and leafed expertly through its pages, perusing the words and assessing the quality of the penmanship. "Where do you come from, friend?" he asked in a different voice.

"Here and there," came the answer. "London once, Oxford before that."

Peter pricked up his ears. "Where?"

"Oxford." The man made a vague sketching movement in the dirt with his blunt fingers, mapping his travels. A series of towers and spires grew around him.

"Never heard of it," said Peter.

"I'm not surprised. You're just a young popinjay."

Peter stiffened, stung by the insult. "That may be, but this town you mention, where exactly is it?"

"To the north, across the water. No easy journey, I assure you."

"Is it a place of learning?"

"Second only to Paris."

"And does it have a library?"

The man looked up, aware he had an audience. I gripped my apple wine more tensely, sensing where the argument was headed. The stranger noticed my uneasiness and stumbled to his feet.

He wedged himself between us. "Buy me another drink and I shall tell you all you wish to know." He waved his empty mug at Peter. "William's my name."

I glanced at Peter, who was clutching the remaining coins in his sweaty palm. He could not resist the urge to learn more. He marched into the adjoining room and soon returned with three more flagons of apple-wine.

I could already feel the first mug clouding my judgment and slid my second to William, who guzzled it in one go. He smeared his sleeve over his mouth and then began to tell us about the university town of Oxford. Words streamed from his lips almost as freely as the wine entered them.

He had been a student of theology, he said, living a virtuous life in virtual poverty, when a girl named Moll ignited a passion in is heart — and a fire in his loins. For some reason this did not sit well with the proctors who prowled the town by night, maintaining order and discipline, and he had been cast out from the university in disgrace. Then, when Moll's family got wind of the affair, William had fled for his life, pursued by a rabble of drunken townies, as he called them. Ever since, he had been driven to distraction, moving from library to library, working as a scribe. Those books he could not copy he carried with him in his head.

"If life has taught me one thing," he said, "there is nothing so loyal or true as the written word."

"And this library in Oxford," Peter prompted him. "Is it large?"

William's eyes took on a dreamy appearance. "Chests full of books; colleges crowded with manuscripts; bookbinders forever preparing new ones…Nothing can compare!" he said. "Even now a new library is being built to accommodate the collection of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, God rest his soul." He made a clumsy attempt at signing the cross on his stained doublet. "It will surely be a new Alexandria, the greatest seat of learning this side of Rome!"

"Will it?" said Peter dubiously.

I, too, was disinclined to believe him. The library of Alexandria, I knew, had been built by the Greeks to accommodate all the scrolls and manuscripts in the world. It had been the most impressive, exalted depository of books in history. Yet what had taken its devoted libarians hundred of years to acquire from passing travelers had been lost in a blazing inferno. Many of the greatest works known to man had gone up in smoke, the victims of that most avaricious reader: fire. Even now, I supposed, there was a chance the dragon skin could revive them.

"And if we should attempt to find this library?" asked Peter, filling me with trepidation.

"Just follow the banks of the River Thames from that great eyesore, London, and you cannot miss it," said William. "I have traveled far and wide, but I have yet to meet its match."

With that, William reached the end of his story. With a last apologetic belch, he sank to his knees and collapsed in a heap on the floor, leaving Peter and me to ponder his information alone.

Outside, the noise of the fair reminded us of our duties and we reluctantly left the alehouse to join Herr Gutenberg and Fust in the Town Hall.

That evening, in the dormitory of the inn where we were lodging, Peter turned to me.

"This place William spoke of," he whispered. "That is where you must go."

The words stabbed at my heart. I knew Peter could not easily come with me, but the prospect that I was to leave Mainz — and travel alone — was too much to bear. For a moment, my eyes pricked with tears and I rolled over to face the pale, snoring stranger by my side to keep him from noticing. The long communal bed was full of rank, unwashed bodies.

Fust and Herr Gutenberg, like many of the richer merchants, had opted for finer accommodation a few streets away, leaving us to fend for ourselves.

"It's the only way," continued Peter. "I've been thinking. When I was copying books in Paris, I came across an old saying: 'The safest place to hide a leaf is in a forest.' How could anyone find a solitary leaf among so many trees?"

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the scene. Each time I came close to counting all those leaves, the wind shifted slightly and rearranged the branches. It was a fool's task — an undertaking to last all eternity.

Peter put his hand on my shoulder. "Don't you see? The best place to lose the dragon skin is in a library. The paper would be lost in a labyrinth of words, a forest of books. Fust would never be able to find it."

Begrudgingly, I nodded. My toolkit had already completed its magical transformation into a small book, as though it knew its destiny. The brown leather covers, with my name printed on it, were guarded by two dragon-claw clasps that kept the paper inside from stirring and revealing their secrets. Perhaps the sheets in the chest would do the same?

"The Library of St. Victor is too near," said Peter, referring to the abbey in Paris where he had trained as a scribe. "Fust would follow you there too easily and discover the book in no time. He knows it all too well. But this library in Oxford is unknown. It could be even larger…It's certainly far enough away; Fust would never find you."

The thought ripped at my heart. I started shaking. Then, recalling the way Fust had been creeping closer to me ever since I had opened the chest, as if I held the key to everything he wanted, I knew that Peter was right. I must go. I had no choice but to sacrifice my own happiness to save the skin.